Diary of a Mad Scientist

I’m back in Brooksville FL:
www.girlmark.com/tour

Biodiesel Essentials: October 9-10, 2008
Advanced Topics in Biodiesel: October 11-12

Biodiesel Essentials:
(no prior experience required)
Biodiesel fuel can be made in your backyard or garage for under $1/a gallon with common ingredients, using very inexpensive equipment. Relatively little chemistry knowledge is needed to produce quality fuel that will run in any diesel engine, and thousands of people around the country have discovered homebrewing fuel to be an addictive hobby. Come learn what it takes to produce your own clean-burning biodiesel fuel, and to build the equipment to do so.

These classes are hands-on and fast-paced - you’ll be making test batches of fuel, titrating and testing oil, and assessing quality of the finished product throughout the two day class.

Advanced Topics in Biodiesel Production
(must have prior experience making biodiesel, or have attended a class, see www.girlmark.com/tour for more information)

The advanced class is designed for those who already make biodiesel (full-scale or test batches) or have attended hands-on workshops by teachers such as Jennifer Radtke, John Bush, Steve Fugate, BioLyle Rudensey, Piedmont Biofuels, Matt Steiman, Frankie Lind, Kalib Kersch, or others who teach from the http://biodieselcommunity.org techniques (check with me if a class is your only hands-on experience).

Some of the topics covered in the advanced class include:

Quality control in great detail, analysis of real-world problems with offspec biodiesel, acid-base biodiesel process, advanced topics in dewatering, testing for soap,methanol recovery and equipment design, testing recovered methanol for purity, waterless washing with Amberlite and Magnesol, larger-scale equipment design (for co-ops or small farms), treating wash water and glycerine for disposal, testing wash water and glycerine, acidifying wash water and glycerine, esterifying oils recovered from acidified glycerine/wash water, in-depth disposal/sidestreams discussion, burning glycerine safely for energy, hydronic applications for biodiesel and wash water heating, more advanced discussion of safety and disaster prevention scenarios for larger-scale processor systems, discussion of regulatory topics for non-commercial producers larger than homebrew, solar heating options, very through discussion/demonstration of several different options in washing, including drawbacks and advantages, greywater systems for wash water recycling

Biodiesel Production Classes on Long Island, NY!

Riverhead, LI
Biodiesel Essentials: September 18-19
Advanced Topics in Biodiesel: September 20-21

to register: www.girlmark.com/tour

Last year’s classes took place in Kevin Shea’s amazing dome home- here’s a photo from my January 08 class, which barely does justice to the enormous dome this guy lives in (and, tisk tisk, why are you guys all not wearing your safety glasses?):

I am so insanely excited to go back to New York City again when I do this Long Island class. New York City is only 8 hours north of where I am living now and I’ve been just about everywhere on the East Coast in the last few years except there. I spent about 24 hours visiting the city in January, and that’s the only time I’ve been back in 8 years.

New York City is my hometown.

My summer so far:

first of all, I’m sick again. I’m sick of it. I can’t figure out what’s up, except that it seems that every time I get tick bitten, I have some Lyme symptoms about 5 days later. It must have something to do with an immune response to something in tick saliva, or a reaction to some other bacterium or virus, or maybe I was just overdoing it since early May, or… I’ve given up on figuring it out, as it’s just about impossible to do a controlled experiment with my own body to figure this out because changes to my meds, diet, etc, don’t have an immediate effect that’s easy to distinguish from other factors.

I’m taking antibiotics because of the May tick bite and subsequent arthritis/neck pain/tiredness, but also just started some other herbal formulas that tend to knock people out pretty bad. Our end of North Carolina has more ticks this year than ever before- lucky me- and their record numbers have even made the papers. We’re getting covered with them every time anyone walks through the woods. I’ve never regarded my surroundings as being ‘toxic’ before, and it’s really freaky being out on our 80 acres without being able to go for walks in the woods, which I’d spent all winter doing. I’m comparing notes with a couple of other friends with Lyme, and one of them is on the same new herbal stuff as me, and it may be that my new symptoms are a Jarsch-Herxheimer reaction to my antibiotics, some other kind of reaction to the new meds since other people seem to have trouble with them, a reinfection with something (not necessarily Lyme) in May, an autoimmune response, or, or… I don’t know what. It’s driving me a bit nuts. Last week I was doing fine, this weekend’s biodiesel class knocked me out hard, and I’m barely able to function this week. I’m hoping that means that next week will be fine again- who knows.

But, I’m having a blast this summer, since I’ve been mostly well for most of it so far till this week.

Some photos:

interns. I’m running the internship program at the co-op, and I’m having a really good time with it. I’m on-site all the time, I barely see my room anymore, and I’m having an absolute blast.

Now that the first couple of weeks of orientation is over, I’m teaching about 1 1/2 days a week, along with some administrative type crap having to do with the program, and doing some work-days coordination. They’re giving the co-op campus a complete makeover, working on documentation for the equipment at the site so that Piedmont can put more of their technical innovation up on the web, and learning a ton. They have me for a day and a half a week and Bob Armantrout for two hours a week. I go to Bob’s biodiesel business basics class just to heckle him. It’s a blast heckling someone who’s teaching and knows more than me- my damn workshop students do it all the time.

It’s about a month into the program and I think everyone’s got a pretty good idea about biodiesel quality control. I’d looked at my syllabus material this spring and figured out that I have enough material to cover about 10 weeks of lessons pretty intensively, and I’m quite happy this week to see that the interns are just about where I expected them to be. We’ve been playing in the Yellow Garage in the ‘lab’ and with my portable Appleseed equipment- we basically have ‘real’ production at the co-op, where fuel production meets ASTM specs and timelines matter, and then we have my experimental teaching/R&D facility, exactly what I’ve been wanting in California for the past few years.

Next week they get to graduate to the ‘real’ co-op, where making mistakes matters a whole lot more. They have an assignment to get to that level, though- completing a batch in the Appleseed stuff on their own. It was cute watching them spend an hour developing a protocol for what valve they were going to turn when, label everything and name it, etc. Good process to go through.

I love being on-site all the time. I’ve got a hybrid shop/classroom, and it’s staffed with all my small, portable tools, and I’m surprised at how good of an R&D facility it’s become. I’ve been working my butt off on the benefit classes we organized for the last few weeks and haven’t been able to get my head above water since mid-May- there was a four-weekend series that helped fund the internship program. The drawback is the barn/shop/classroom setting is that it’s damn hot here this time of year- we actually overheated a few people in the first two weekend classes (the next one , the Advanced Topics class, should be in air conditioning at least most of the weekend).

System Tricks class designs their theoretical process and equipment:

I decided early on that the internship should include making sure that some basic skills and tool use were covered, whether they’re relevant to biodiesel or not. I got to inflict this on one of the farm interns, too- there are three farm interns living here at the co-op, in addition to the biodiesel ones in my program. Here’s Becca from the farm making herself some printmaking blocks out of a piece of MDF and learning about the different ways to jig a circ saw, and yes, that’s a gigantic load of oil behind her:

These are two of the three biodiesel interns working on the solar cooker project- Susannah, with the red hair, and Joanna, in the red shirt, who are here partially out of an interest in sustainability. This weekend they get to do their first ‘tabling’ session at the Eno River Festival, where the co-op gets to answer stupid questions from random visitors about biodiesel. Today a bunch of us veterans talked to them about what to expect when tabling and gave them some ’sample questions’ to think about (such as ‘I heard that biodiesel takes food away from starving babies, what do you think about that’) .

In the midst of all this, there’s a big re-design of the Piedmont oil handling protocol going on. For the past couple of years, they’ve been settling oil in 275-gallon IBC containers in a poorly functioning passive solar building, which is a really clunky and ineffective way to do things (you can’t heat oil with warm air alone and expect anything significant to settle out of it, which means you have to either throw out 25% of your oil (which they do) or be super-selective about the kinds of oil you can accept (which they also have to do). We’ve finally figured out how to fund a real waste oil burner type of boiler system. One of the interns is starting off his summer by trying to fix up an old waste motor oil furnace we had around, though there’s been an immense amount of thought and meeting time put into ideas for homemade waste oil burners. Of course, I dragged out the Turk again. I’m a huge fan of vaporizing burners rather than atomizing ones, and a couple of weeks ago, one of the locals introduced me to a Sanford former homebrewer who has a really fantastic Turk-burner-based backyard metalcasting furnace. Chuck’s Turk burner does everything that I’d wanted to try next. We had a powerhouse meeting or two over at his place in sanford, geeking out on level control, heat recovery, and more. One of Chuck’s big innovations was basically to add refractory cement to the burn chamber, which I’d thought about last year but never got a chance to try.

I dug out another blower for mine and am just about to move on to the heat exchanger end of things. In the meantime it’s still a fun party trick unit.

Here it is again, the Turk Burner as a ’scientific theory generator’- people can’t stand around this thing without going on and on about what they think it’s doing at various points in it’s burn cycle.

And, last but not least, I’m really proud of the fact that we’re moving ahead on heat problems 6 months before they’re really an issue. That’s major progress around these parts- moving ahead rather than just responding to emergencies.

This year, summer solstice was 8 pm on June 20th. I happen to have spent that exact moment in the best way imaginable- at the end of a long work day, with my new-again boyfriend/co-worker Greg, lazing in the co-op’s front yard hammock in the stifling North Carolina heat, running plans and scenarios for burner and heater options for the co-op. On the longest day of the year, we were trying to imagine what the frozen fingers and short daylight hours and 20F nights were going to be like in December. I’m psyched to have this playground for bouncing these burner ideas off of people.

Through this all, I feel like I’m at Biodiesel Summer Camp. Appropriately, there’s a summer fling. Greg and I were hanging out earlier this winter, but it’s a lot more fun this time around, especially with the Summer Camp focus- I’m teaching him how to weld, he’s supposed to teach me to use a chainsaw, and we’re throwing around ideas for Turk Burner fun and games for the classroom site and a possible future experimental boiler, and some random Weird Science. I get to run home (he’s also my neighbor) and bounce around the room going on and on about the new acid-base idea I just had. He gets to contribute. It rocks.

It’s been quite a few years since I’ve gotten to work on projects with a partner, which was a source of endless frustration in my last relationship. It’s kind of lame being me, and more or less having to “check the biodiesel stuff at the door” when I came home, since my last partner didn’t really care about it. To some extent, ‘checking the biodiesel at the door’ was my own fault- Tom didn’t require it, but there’s a big difference between basic ‘that’s nice, dear’ tolerance of the biodiesel pursuit and complete obsession with it like happens here in Piedmont-land. I know, what I just described, a bored/uninterested partner- happens to most people who are into biodiesel, and most people’s partners aren’t interested- but I kept feeling that for all the time I’ve invested in the Gods of Biodiesel, I shouldn’t have to end up with one of the heathen unbelievers.

My summer feels like a complete immersion program into oil geekery. It’s nice to head in that direction with another nerd.

We’ve been working on a plywood solar box cooker as a way to teach some of the circular saw/table saw safety skills to some of the interns and other co-op folks who haven’t used those tools or gotten a good introduction to them before. I used to teach a 45-minute circular saw mini-workshop, and I’m ecstatic that Tim, who’s one of my co-workers at Piedmont and is also responsible for getting the interns edumacated, also enjoys teaching the ‘basic skills’ intros. We had a nice, late-into-the-night-with-Tim-drinking-beer session whereby Tim, who’s all of 22 years old, has an education degree in ’shop teacher’, and is trying his damnedest to be a grumpy old man, expounded on the things that his woodworker daddy taught him and passed on measure-once-cut-twice wisdom to one of the enthusiastic interns.

I’m building a plywood version of the Heaven’s Flame Cooker, the Appleseed of solar box cookers. Here’s a link to the cardboard version of the same design that I’m using- from Joe Radabaugh’s article in Backwoods Home Mag a long time ago:

http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/radabaugh30.html

and a photo of a couple of cardboard ones:
http://solarcooking.org/images/hflame1.jpg

Joe is (was?) a barefoot oldtimey Rainbow Gathering hippie who got obsessed with building and testing cardboard box cookers, and I’ve made a bunch of wooden versions of his cooker over the years. It’s pretty similar to the steel version sold through Real Goods and the like, such as the one at http://www.sunoven.com/. He figured out a bunch of easy construction techniques and has a great book about the units,

These units reach 350-375F pretty easily as a baking oven, or can be used to cook crockpot/soup types of dishes (I personally used my past ones to make beans, soups, rice- things that waste fuel in long simmering. I also tend to not waste time trying to boil water in a box cooker (think of how slow it’d be to bring water to a boil in an oven- that’s the same situation here, and probably the most common mistake that people demonstrating solar cookers make, which may make them appear impractical). I tend to first bring the food to a boil on a stovetop, then put it into the cooker to finish up, which makes my solar cooking happen in the same amount of time as on a stovetop.

The difference between what we’re doing and what Joe has in the cardboard box plans, is that we’ll have a door in the back of the oven so that it’s easier to get food in and out (his version involves taking off the top glass for access), and that we’re using plywood for greater durability. I’ve had one or two of these last a couple of years in the rain, unpainted. You occasionally have to deal with warped reflectors but there’s not too much maintenance involved even with the cheap materials. I’m still using cardboard for insulation, which is cheap, effective, and non-toxic. I’ve never built a double-glass one before, but Joe’s book described an experiment where he reached 400F air temperature and nearly burned down his own cooker by rotating it to keep it in constant focus, empty, at high altitude, double-glazed.

The biggest challenges to solar cooking in the US are social- changing your habits to plan around peak daytime cooking times (such as having a small cooker at work where you use it to heat up your lunch), or putting food in the cooker in the morning so that it’ll get heated during peak hours, and also remembering that you’ve got something in the quiet cookstove going outside while you’re home (it’s actually quite easy to forget, since people aren’t used to cooking outside anymore).

Idealistic people from rich countries tend to think of these as something you inflict on people in third world countries to save ‘them’ from poverty and to save the environment from ‘their’ fuelwood practices (see Sunoven website above for a typical example of this, actually), but they don’t tend to get adopted that way for many social reasons either. A typical example is a development group returning to a project site a year later to find the cooker being used for storing valuables to keep them from mice or rain while the family continues to use the three-stone fire their family recipes are adapted to.

We don’t really see them in use in the US very often, and there are so many of them deployed as ‘demonstration units’ at sustainability campuses similar to Piedmont, sitting unused, that it’s almost a cliche of what goes wrong with appropriate technology idealism- it’s an awesome technology, and no one ever seems to want to use it. We once bucked this trend at the Bat Cave, a 6-person house where I lived in Oakland (that also had the full-on greywater, permaculture garden, vermiculture compost ‘deluxe worm condo’, composting toilet, bees, and bike library going in the backyard), and the sucker got used for a couple of years by several people in the house for beans quite regularly (everyone had spent a lot of time in Mexico and made a lot of bean dishes every single week) and occasionally other dishes.

They work best in situations where you have a kitchen door that faces a south-facing yard, or, even better, a deck off of a kitchen door. We might be able to get this to work at the co-op at the Yellow House. They also work well for reheating of lunches- since there’s no microwave, and a number of employees come and go throughout the day, I’m guessing that’ll be the most common use.

I’ve also thought about building a small monitoring panel to see if that furthers acceptance by US users- something like a remote thermometer in the oven that monitors either oven temperature or food temperature, and a control panel with audio timer/alarm and other info in the kitchen, that reminds you that you’ve got food out there and tells you how long it’s been heating.

There’ve been some attempts at building a self-tracking oven such as the one described at this link: http://www.solarcooking.org/plans/Cookerbo.pdf

(usually you have to rotate the cooker once or twice in the afternoon to get full possible BTU’s. However, during most of the year, you can also just set it in the morning, pointed at the spot where the sun will be during peak hours, and your stuff will cook during those hours, but the cooker won’t reach it’s maximum temperature without periodic rotating) .

In a way, what I was doing with the solar cooker is more like what you’d do with a haybox cooker- so if you don’t have a good solar site, you can still cut down on some of your energy use by adopting the ‘haybox’ concept, either as an old-time, bulky haybox, or a more high-tech vacuum-insulated thermos version. I’ve played around with the haybox idea using a Japanese vacuum thermos that had an exceptionally large mouth- this particular one was used for carrying individual tins of lunch foods to work rather than coffee, and worked well for a cooker. The traditional haybox is exactly that- a box that’s insulated with hay, that your pot fits into. I saw one at CCAT in Arcata, CA (http://www.appropedia.org/CCAT)

I feel like the lack of acceptance of solar cookers in the US is due to the principle ‘the perfect is the enemy of the good’- people trying to do the whole thing ‘low-tech’, which isn’t really necessary. You live in a house, you have electricity, if your photovoltaic panels have a control panel so you can monitor what they’re doing, why not design a solar cooker with a simple and cheap control panel to make use easier, or use a bit of electricity or natural gas to make solar cooking more convenient? Similarly, I think I found them easy to use because my objective at the Bat Cave was just to be a cheapskate, rather than be ‘offgrid’- so rather than trying to be completely electricity-free, I found it much more convenient and still energy-saving to use electricity for 3 minutes to bring my bean water to a boil, and then switch to simmering for the same 60 minutes using just the sun, rather than spending 2 hours bringing water to a boil with 300F air and minimal direct heat in the name of purist off-grid-ness. I think that a hybrid approach to sustainability can get you further than the minimalist approach at times.